


ain't nobody left can sing the blues

by Sorrel



Series: Native Skin [1]
Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Emotional Constipation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Huddling For Warmth, Pining, Post-Season/Series 02, partnership is the best ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 19:59:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15692361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorrel/pseuds/Sorrel
Summary: Triangles are great for pyramids, less so for people.  Especially when your cornerstone goes on walkabout.





	ain't nobody left can sing the blues

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written after the season 2 finale, but I didn't finish it in time before season 3 started. I recently dusted it off, finished it, and fixed it to be more or less canon-compliant. I haven't watched any of season 4 yet so if I've been Jossed then ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.
> 
> The song in the opener is "Don't Make 'em Like They Used To" by The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer, previously featured in 1x09 "Enemy Khlyen." If you want to listen along to really get that "music montage action sequence" feeling, youtube link is [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7kOvUspDGc).

_♪♫ Hard times I’m going through_  
_Got a woman and she can’t be true, oh well_  
_They just don’t make ‘em like they used to ♪♫_

"Your destination is one hundred meters and closing," Lucy's voice drones. "Ninety-seven meters and closing. Ninety-five meters and closing. Ninety-"

"I get the point!" D'avin ducks into a roll as a bullet comes whining over his shoulder, grunting when he hits the cracked cement. He comes up into a spin and fires, half-blind, but from the skeever's yelp of pain he hit _something,_ so he stumbles to his feet with a grimace and starts moving again, glaring at his surroundings with each visual sweep. "Where are these assholes even coming from?”

“A significant amount of the sewer system seems to remain intact, according to my surface scans. Perhaps they have made their home there?”

“Great. Sewer rats with guns. My favorite.”

"D'av!" Dutch's shouted warning is like a shot going off right in his ear, too-loud after minutes of Lucy’s quiet tones. "On your left!"

He doesn't bother with visual confirmation, just swings left and fires at the first thing that moves. His bullet goes straight through the throat of the oncoming skeever, and he turns around to throw a salute towards one of the upper stories, where he knows Dutch is working her way towards the sniper nest they spotted on approach. “Much obliged.”

“Wouldn’t have to be if you’d watch your flank,” she says absently. Through the comm, he can hear the creak of blasted floorboards under her feet, and prays, not for the first time, that she doesn’t go through. They picked the least-destroyed sector to make their approach, but in these parts, that’s not saying much. “This isn’t a stroll through the bazaar, D’av. Stay sharp.”

“The sharpest.” He pushes forward again, moving low and slow, alert to any noise that isn’t coming from his partner, twenty feet up. “You heard from Fancy?”

“Not since he went offline two minutes ago.”

“With any luck, the skeevers ate him.”

“Play nice,” she reproves, but he can hear the smile in her voice. “Remember, we need him.”

“Yeah? Remind me why again?”

“Because we’re both better at shooting things than-” She cuts off with a short, indrawn breath. “Targets spotted. Going dark.”

“See you on the flip side,” he says, but there’s no response from her end of the line. Fuck. Well, Dutch can take care of herself.

Usually.

“Lucy, how far?”

“Seventy-two meters and closing.”

“Great,” he sighs, and looks up at the battered tower, a rusting hulk thrusting up against the dusty Westerly sky. “I hate Sugar Point.”

_♪♫ Had a friend but he didn’t last_  
_All he left was the knife in my back, oh well_  
_They just don’t make ‘em like they used to ♪♫_

He’s the first one to the rendezvous point, but he can hear Dutch only a little ways behind him, cursing and running in a zig-zag across the open ground near the tower. He spins to put his back to the wall and lays down a round of cover fire, allowing her to dart across the final few meters to his side. She fires off a burst at the skeever on her tail and then falls back against the wall, panting, to wipe a smear of mud off her cheek.

He glances sideways to see a pretty substantial bruise already coming up on her jaw. “Had some trouble with the locals?”

She ducks her head, her hands busy with a reload, but he still catches the upward curl of her faint smile. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“Doesn’t that cover pretty much everything?”

“If you two could stop flirting,” Fancy’s voice comes over the comms, sharp with annoyance and just a little too fast, “I could use some cover fire over here.”

“Aww, buddy. You know you only had to ask.” D’avin hears the oncoming thunder of booted feet and spins right, starts firing in short, careful bursts. There's more of them than a single source of suppressing fire can handle, though, and he can hear Dutch behind him, fumbling with the lock mechanism and cursing under her breath, so he can't ask her for help. So how is he going to-

_Ah, yes,_ he thinks, catching a glimpse of her pack out of the corner of her eye. _Nothing like a little trip down memory lane._

"Hey, Fancy!" he says, and reaches back without looking to pull one of the suppression grenades out of Dutch’s pack. "Deep breaths!" 

The suppression cloud sends the skeevers fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, hacking thick, oily black smoke out of their lungs. A moment later, Fancy’s familiar lean outline appears out of the smoke, moving low and fast with his shirt pulled up over his nose and his pistol pointed low. He ducks the enraged swipe of one of the skeevers left standing and goes into a perfect third-base slide across the open ground between them. D’avin fires off another short round and then hears Dutch’s triumphant grunt as the door finally clicks open.

“Let’s move, people!” she says, and D’avin keeps firing, counting down in his head, _one and two_ and Fancy’s through _and three and four_ and Dutch is in _and_ _five and six_ and he moves, stepping backwards into open air and sliding around the doorframe, firing one last burst before the door slams shut and Dutch slaps a sealer right over the handle, gluing it shut.

“Nice,” he says appreciatively, and she grins up at him.

“We try,” she says, and thrusts her hand down towards Fancy, hauling him bodily to his feet. “Fancy, good of you to join us.”

Fancy gives her an annoyed glance and turns sharply, his gaze going down the hall towards the elevator. “See if you can keep up,” he says, and then he’s gone, scanner in one hand and the pistol in the other, ducked low to avoid line of sight through the windows and moving fast.

Dutch exchanges a look with D'avin, somewhere between resigned and amused, then jerks her head after him. “Shall we?”

He grins back and gestures with the muzzle of his rifle. “Ladies first.”

_♪♫ Where did the land of plenty go?_  
_It’s up above and I’m six feet below, oh well_  
_They just don’t make ‘em like they used to ♪♫_

“You know, it’s not like I don’t appreciate the opportunity for a bit of target practice,” D’avin says, leaning over the railing to pick off another skeever trying his luck at the open space some short-sighted Company architect left at the foot of the stairway. "I'm just wondering what you've got in mind for an exit strategy."

Dutch takes aim and shoots almost lazily, dropping the big skeever in the back. They go down with a shout of alarm. “We’re on a roof, aren’t we?”

“ _That’s_ your grand plan?” Another skeever pushes forward, holding up a shredded chunk of metal over his head like a shield, and D’avin takes a moment to aim before shooting his legs out from under him. The guy goes down like a rock with a teakettle shriek of pain he can hear from all the way up here, joining the little heap of his more adventurous comrades. “Get to high ground and hope for the best?”

“Oh, so when it’s your idea, it’s sound tactical strategy, but when I do it, it’s stupid?”

“I wasn’t ‘hoping for the best,’ we had additional support incoming at a scheduled evac-”

“Lucy’s autopilot can get her here in two minutes, and she’ll be on her way as soon as we get that conduit open. You saying you can’t hold out against a bunch of skeevers for two minutes?”

He gives a little growl of frustration and drops another finger grenade down over the railing. The skeevers dive away, then press back in almost immediately, having gotten wise to this maneuver. “Gonna be a lot more than that if Fancy here can’t get the damn door open.”

“Hold your horses, big guy. I’m working on it.”

Sometimes, D’avin misses that brief window of time where he had the power to make the guy’s head explode just by thinking about it really hard. “ _Work faster,_ ” he growls. “Sooner or later, they’re going to remember that the stairs aren’t the only way up.”

“Relax,” Fancy says. “They’re not that bright.”

No sooner have the words left his lips than a cheery _ding!_ cuts through the air from off to his right. D’avin turns to see the elevator doors straining against the rest of the can of sealant, and exchanges a despairing glance with Dutch. She sighs, mimes strangling Fancy one-handed behind his back, and then turns in one smooth movement to cover the doors.

“One of these days,” she calls over her shoulder, “he’s going to learn not to jinx us.”

“I wouldn’t hold your breath.” D’avin takes another shot at the crowd near the stairway. One access point is bad enough; getting flanked by rabid skeevers with delusions of grandeur isn’t on his to-do list today. “‘Come be a killjoy,’” he mimics under his breath. “‘Shoot bad guys, blow shit up, save the day, get paid lots of money. What could go wrong?’” Another shot. “And she’s got the nerve to complain about _Fancy_ jinxing things.”

Three more shots, and then, right on schedule, the dreaded click of an empty mag. “I’m out!” he calls, and slings his rifle across his back. “Fancy, you better be almost fucking done over there.”

“Just a minute,” Fancy says, focused on the keypad. “This isn’t as easy as it looks, you know. Too old for any biometric traces and the tech is woefully outdated, which means all of my current hacks-”

“Boys,” Dutch calls, backing up slightly. Sparks spit through the half-open elevator doors, a blowtorch cutting through the sealant. “I believe we have incoming.”

“ _Fuck,_ ” D’avin says feelingly. “We’re about to get flanked!”

“I’m almost there-”

“ _Be there faster,”_ D’avin says, and pulls out his sidearm. Only suppression rounds, but better than nothing, especially at close range. “Come the fuck on, asshole, _Lucy_ could hack this thing faster than you-”

The door snicks open behind him. “You were saying?” Fancy shoves his PDD back into his belt pocket and starts fiddling with some wires. “All I’ve got to do is unhook the receiver and then-”

The distinct piercing wail of an alarm going off splits through the dusty afternoon air. D’avin, in the middle of moving up to cover the top of the stairway, stops and looks slowly over his shoulder at Fancy, who’s cautiously withdrawing his hand from the inside of the power conduit, which, in addition to making enough noise to wake the dead, is also flashing a really alarming shade of orange.

“Um,” Fancy says. “Oops?”

###### 

Back on Lucy, D’avin takes advantage of his complete lack of shame to start pulling off his filthy gear right in the middle of the cargo bay, leaving it in a little heap next to the rambler to clean later. Fancy gives him a faintly scandalized look.

"What, you don't want to get in on this?" D'avin says, grinning. "You got pretty drenched fishing me out of that cistern, you know. You could probably use a spin through decon yourself."

"No, thank you," Fancy says frostily, and turns his back to climb the crew ladder. "I think a regular shower will suffice."

"You're missing out!" D'avin calls after him. "The pressure is really much better down here!"

Fancy doesn't bother with a response, unless you count a raised middle finger. D'avin turns to Dutch with a grin. "Do you think it's something I said?"

Dutch doesn't smile back at him, though, just keeps pulling down the decontamination setup, her expression fixed and distant, like she wasn't even listening. The grin fades from his face, and he turns away, busying himself with unlacing his boots. His jeans are sopping still, clinging in a way that’s really starting to chafe, but his lack of shame does not extend to stripping down to his unders in front of Dutch without a damn good reason.

"There," Dutch says, and he turns around to see the shower curtain hung and waiting. "I'll grab a towel for you as soon as we're in the air."

“Sure you don’t want to stick around? What I said to Fancy goes double for you, you know.”

She shrugs and points to her jacket, left discarded on the front seat of the rambler. “That got the worst of it. I’ll be fine with a regular shower.”

“Better move fast if you want to beat Fancy to it,” he advises. “Ooh, unless you’re going to arm-wrestle? This I gotta see.”

“Cute,” she says witheringly, and turns to head towards the ladder.

He reaches out to stop her; lightly, just two fingers brushed against her bare shoulder, but she still startles almost as badly as if he’d taken a swing at her. He lets his hand drop to his side and eyes her with new concern. “Dutch?”

"I'm fine," she says. He gives her a skeptical look, and she blows out a noisy sigh through pursed lips, reaches out and grabs his hand again to give it a squeeze. “It’s just been a very, very long day. Buy me a drink later?”

"It's a deal.” He gives her hand an answering squeeze and then lets go, and she gives him a brief smile that she probably doesn’t realize looks quite as strained as it does and turns to head for the cockpit ladder.

D’avin watches her go, then shakes his head and turns back to the shower. "Lucy? Water, please. As hot as you can make it."

"The hottest water I could provide would cause scalding burns in under thirty seconds,” Lucy says, in a polite tone of voice he knows better than to trust. “Of course, if you’re looking to further your habit of getting yourself into dangerous situations without forethought, I am of course programmed to oblige.”

D'avin goes to scrub a hand over his face, then catches a look at the muck ground into the skin around his knuckles and thinks better of it, dropping his hand back to his side with a weary sigh. Why is it that all of the women in his life are going out of their way to make things complicated?

"C'mon, Luce, cut me a break. I had to do something to short out the receiver, the whole tower was about to go up.”

“Only because _that man_ failed to fully disengage the alarm mechanism.”

It’s been two weeks, and she still hasn’t used Fancy’s name. _Then again, if he’d stop trying to poke around in her insides, she’d probably be a little more forgiving._

“Look,” he says, determinedly ignoring how strange it feels to be defending Fancy at all, much less to a spaceship, “I’m always as happy to make fun of that asshole as the next guy, but even I gotta admit that thirty year old power transfer stations are not exactly his specialty. He got us in, Dutch got the doodad, we finished the warrant. It worked out.”

There’s a brief and stubborn silence. “I just want to make sure that you come back.”

He closes his eyes, feeling his brother’s absence like a rotten tooth, an ache he can’t stop poking. “I’ll do what I can, Luce. That’s all I can promise.”

"I know, D'avin," Lucy says. There's a tone in her synthesized voice he's only ever heard when speaking to Johnny - something that he could almost call tenderness, if he didn’t know better. "You're doing your best."

###### 

Half an hour later, thoroughly sanitized and dressed in clothes that aren’t covered in Westerly muck, D’avin removes himself to the kitchen, grabs the cheapest bottle of hokk they have in the cabinet, and takes it over to the table, not bothering with a glass. By the time he has his rifle broken down and cleaned to a fine polish, he’s feeling warm and loose and considerably less like he’s going to snap and punch the wall on sheer principle.

It’s a nice rifle, he thinks, squinting down the barrel. A new piece, something Dutch picked up for him on Leith to test out, but he’s still not sure if he can give it a thumbs-up for her to use. On the upside, it didn't jam on him in spite of some _serious_ dirt flying around, which he always appreciates in a piece of machinery. On the downside, it did feel a little sticky on the reload, which is something he knows would annoy the shit out of Dutch. Long guns aren't her favorite in the first place, and at the first sign of something working less-than-perfectly she has a tendency to ditch the rifle and go back to her comfort zone.

It might not be a problem with every model, though; from the look of things it’s just be a factory defect, an imperfection in the casting. It’s hard to tell without a magnifying glass, but there’s a good chance that if if he can figure out where the fuck Johnny left his toolkit, he can file down the mechanism just enough so that it won't snag on the-

There’s a thump, and a dented metal case appears in his field of vision, half-covered in hokk labels and smeary with old engine grease. "Can you read minds now?" he says, looking from the toolkit up to Fancy's unsmiling face. "Did the green shit leave you with fun new superpowers and you forgot to mention it to the rest of us? 'Cause if so, I gotta tell you, Dutch is going to want to have a word."

Fancy rolls his eyes and turns the chair around, sitting down astride and folding his arms over the back. "Don't be more of an idiot than you have to be."

D'avin snorts and chalks that up to a draw, tugging over Johnny’s toolkit and rooting through the painfully over-organized contents until he finds a file about the right size. “Where’d you turn this up, anyway? I’ve been trying to find it for days.”

“Under his bed. Along with three socks, five PDDs in various states of configuration, and some old holocomic. Captain Atlas or something.”

“Oh yeah?” D’avin says, as if his heart hasn’t just skipped a beat. He clears his throat and starts running the file over the faulty part. “What’d you do with it?”

Fancy shrugs, a small understated roll of his shoulders. “Put it in the spare locker with the rest of his junk,” he says. “Why, you want it?”

“Well, you know me,” D’avin says, not looking up. _He kept it. I thought for sure he would have tossed it straight into the incinerator, but he_ kept _it._ “I like a bit of light bedtime reading.”

“You can read?”

_Ugh._ “You want anything in particular, or did you just come here to bust my chops?”

“Both, most certainly,” Fancy says, with the faintest twitch of his lips. “I am a complicated man.”

“That’s _a_ word for it.” D’avin blows the metal shavings away from the mag and looks up. “So what’s the other thing?”

Fancy looks down at his folded hands, with about as hesitant an expression as D’avin’s ever seen. He raises an eyebrow and waits with breathless anticipation. The guy prides himself on being a social maladjust; what the hells could make _Fancy_ feel awkward?

"I need you to talk to Dutch," Fancy admits.

Whatever D’avin was expecting him to say, that wasn’t it. "Dutch? What for?"

Fancy gives him an unamused look. "As if you don't know."

"Uh, yeah, pretty clueless here. Gonna have to fill me in."

Fancy gets that overly-patient look, like he thinks D’avin is being purposely obtuse. "I know we haven't always gotten along well-"

"That's an understatement."

"-and I'm just as unhappy about this arrangement than you are-"

"Oh I highly doubt that."

"-but please don’t doubt that I will do anything, _anything_ to stop these Hullen. Including,” he adds, disdain a familiar curl to his lip, “working with you.”

“Right,” says D’avin, who is too tired and probably also a little too drunk to be dealing with this conversation right now, “and this has to do with Dutch… how, exactly?"

Fancy sighs and looks down at his folded hands. “I told your brother, you know. Back at the beginning. Teams of three don’t _work,_ not for any length of time. Too many variables. Most don’t last six months.”

D’avin sits back and folds his arms over his chest. “We did.”

“No you didn’t. You filed for divorce a few weeks after that black warrant.”

Shit. He hadn’t thought Fancy would have heard about that; he was already on Arkyn by then, wasn’t he? On the other hand, before D'avin had stumbled blithely into Khlyen's trap like a green cadet, Fancy was almost certainly being groomed to ingratiate himself as Dutch's watchdog. He would have been thoroughly debriefed before his convenient ‘escape.’

“There were… circumstances,” he temporizes, dragging his attention back to the conversation at hand. “We refiled as soon as I got back from Arkyn.”

“Because you three are ruined for anyone else,” Fancy says patiently, as if stating the obvious. “Your brother has a pathological need to be liked, Dutch is psychotically possessive, and you’re incapable of functioning on your own. You pretty much had to make it work.

“Anyway, that’s not my point,” he says, while D’avin is busy gaping at him. “The point is, teams of three are inherently unstable. And you know what kills teams faster even than sex? When the boss has a problem with the new guy.”

D’avin frowns at him. “That’s what this is about? Dude, Dutch doesn’t have a problem with you.” He rubs a hand over his jaw, which still aches, sometimes, in low atmo. He prefers to think it's because he let it go days before someone thought to force him into Lucy's autodoc, but on his better days he knows it's probably psychosomatic. “Trust me, if she does, you’ll know. She’s not a subtle woman.”

"She called me Johnny."

" _What?_ " 

"I guess you missed that, having already done your swan dive off the railing.” Fancy looks torn between annoyed at the memory, and smug that he knows something D’avin doesn’t. “But she definitely called me by your brother’s name.”

D’avin can picture it all too clearly: the human brain is a pattern-making machine, and Dutch had six years to get in the habit of shouting “Johnny!” at the top of her lungs whenever shit hit the fan. She even did it to him once or twice, back in the early days, and he wasn't responsible for the tech stuff like Fancy. It’s a completely understandable mistake, given the givens.

It’s also awkward as fuck.

“That doesn’t mean she has a _problem_ with you,” he tries. “She just-”

“Would rather I be someone else?”

There’s not much he can say to that. It’s true, after all. It’s true for D’avin too, but everyone expects D’avin to be an asshole about it. Dutch is usually the better person.

“I’ll talk to her,” he says with a sigh. “Just give me a bit to work up to it.”

“ _Before_ the next warrant.”

D’avin gives him a flat look. “Yes, Fancy. Before the next warrant. Anything _else_ you need me to do for you?”

“Nope, that’s it.” All smiles now that he’s gotten his way, Fancy unfolds himself from the chair and claps him on the shoulder on his way to the door. “Good luck, hero. You’re gonna need it.”

“Your _face_ is gonna need it,” D’avin mutters at his back. Fancy flips him off as he turns into the hallway, and D’avin sighs and looks back down at the jumble of parts on the table.

Forty-two seconds later, he runs his hand down the reassembled rifle. Not his fastest time by any means, but it’s a new model and he’s had a few drinks. He double-checks to make sure that the magazine is empty and then slots it in, fast and deliberately sloppy, and grins at the obedient click as it slides home. Smooth as silk.

At least something works around here.

###### 

Dutch is in the cockpit when he goes hunting a few minutes later, sitting in Johnny’s old chair in the drive pod and talking to someone on her PDD with a low voice. She glances over her shoulder when she hears the door close behind him, then nods in greeting and flicks her fingers over the console, pulling the call up onto the screen.

“-almost ten years of flight data off that transceiver you picked up,” Turin’s saying, on the other end of the call. “The Root ships would have been cloaked, of course, but with the fancy-ass deep-spectrum scanners on that thing, we’ve got enough that we should be able to identify their cloaking frequency.”

“Finally, some good news.” Dutch blows out a breath between pursed lips. “So how long before we can start tracking down the hive?"

"Well, that's the bad news."

"How bad?"

Turin hesitates for a moment, then sighs. "Two months, maybe more."

"Oh bull _shit._ " Some people, when they're angry, start fidgeting, or make big gestures, like the temper has to break through somehow. Dutch gets all icy-cold and goes for maximum eye contact. It’s a dominance thing. "The RAC has some of the best technical minds in the J. You're telling me that we have to wait _months_ for that brain trust to spit out something useful?"

"Well, maybe if we had a Root ship to examine in more detail, it might go a little faster. Say, didn't you used to have one of those? Any idea where you might have misplaced it?"

"I think what Dutch was trying to say," D'avin jumps in, before she can spit out anything she might or might not regret later, "is that we don't have two months. The Hullen are coming, and we're still sitting ducks out here."

"Trust me, soldier boy, I'm well aware of that. But I can't make intel appear out of thin air, and our best leads on Root movements have all dropped off the face of the goddamn universe."

"Still no luck with any of the former Sixes?" 

"Rabbited to a man - or woman," said with an ironic head-tilt in Dutch's direction. "Fancy Lee is the only one who stuck around, and he was assigned exclusively to Khlyen. We're working on tracking down the others, but that's going to take, say it with me class-"

"Time," Dutch says. It's hard to tell with her poker face, but D'avin's pretty sure she's still simmering. "Time that we don't have."

"Ding ding ding! Gold star for you. Find me some former Sixes, and maybe we'll have a talk about finding that hive. Otherwise? I've got better things to do today than listen to you bitch."

He signs off before either of them can fire back, leaving nothing but a blank screen and the endless field of stars beyond. “Well,” D’avin says, after a moment. “Never rains but it pours, right?”

“I really," Dutch says, staring forward, "really, really hate him sometimes."

"No argument from me." He lifts the spare glass, knowing that she can see it in the reflection on the viewscreen. “Drink?”

“Gods, please,” she says, and makes a grabby gesture. He laughs and hands it over, taking his own glass over to the copilot’s chair. He drops into it with a thump and swivels around to face her, stretching out his legs to prop up his feet on the walkway. She does the same a moment later, cradling the half-full tumbler in her hand and looking pensive.

“So,” he says, breaking the silence. “Sixes."

"As much as I hate to say it, if Turin hasn't found any leads on all those vanished RAC agents, I don't think we're going to do any better." She stares glumly into the depths of her glass. "We'll run them to ground eventually, I'm sure, but I need something _now._ A ship, a facility, hells at this point is take a bloody med-drone if it had Hullen data on it."

"What about Spring Hill? Can we pull anything out of the wreckage there?" 

"Already tried. Gods love you, D'av, but when you decide to destroy a thing you don't go halfway."

He grimaces. "It's a gift."

"It's probably for the best, anyway. If there had been a fraction of a chance it could be brought back, that bitch Kendry would have… What?" she says, looking at him. "What is it? You got a face."

He's have to be half-dead to miss that opening. "Yes, Dutch. I have a face. Standard issue at birth."

"Brat," she says, making a pretty hilarious face of her own. "I _mean,_ you got your 'I have an idea' face."

"And this one doesn't even involve grenades!" he says perkily. Dutch balls up a fist and shakes it at him, and he laughs, holding up a hand in surrender. "Okay, okay, there's no need for violence. I was just thinking- Kendry. She was in that Hullen shit right up to her eyeballs. To the point that when she pulled that hit on Pawter, she made sure to stack the deck with-"

"Hullen bodyguards," Dutch breathes. "Oh, bugger _me,_ the Scarbacks. How did we forget she swapped out all those Scarbacks?" 

"Well, we've had a lot going on," he comforts. "The point is, those weren't RAC agents. And Kendry wasn't the type to waste personnel if she might need them again. She would have sent them underground after the signing."

Dutch follows his train of thought in the space between one breath and the next, with him like she always is. “And since we cured all the sixes converted on Arkyn…”

“...I bet they're feeling pretty lonely out there on their own," he finishes. "Especially since they helped assassinate a Lady of the Land. They've got to know that the official story won't hold up forever, especially with Kendry off the board. How much you want to bet they're holed up somewhere, praying someone doesn't find a way to pin it on them?"

"I never bet against a sure thing." Dutch's smile is sharklike. "Especially if _someone_ were to swear out a warrant for their arrest. After all, we're Killjoys. Finding people who don't want to be found is what we're _for._ "

D'avin leans back in his chair, grinning. "Did I just save the day? I did, didn't I. Does this mean I get the shiny gold star?"

"Don't get cocky," she warns, her beautiful green eyes narrowed with mock anger, but the twitch of her lips makes it hard to take it seriously. "We haven't found them yet."

"Isn't that what the monk is for?"

Dutch rolls her eyes. "And here I thought you two were getting along so well."

"No, why would you say that?" he says, and hastily changes the subject before she can cite examples. "You need to talk to Fancy before the warrant."

This time her warning look has slightly more edges. "About what, exactly?"

He considers backing off - she's obviously ready and willing to take a bite out of him for pushing - but if he had enough common sense to be warned off by flashing danger signs, he wouldn't be on this godsdamned ship in the first place. "That op didn't exactly go smooth as synth-silk today. You know Fancy, he's got his panties all in a twist about it, and he's got your name on 'em." He plays that last sentence back in his head, grimaces, and pushes onward before she can call him on it. "Just talk to him, okay? Give him one of those pep talks you're so famous for."

Her generous mouth twists into a moue of annoyance that’s dangerously close to a pout. "We’re fighting a _war_ here, unless you forgot. Fancy’s a grown man. If he wants to fly solo again, that’s his choice.”

_And we’ll be a man down._ He’s got enough common sense not to say it aloud, but he can tell that it shows on his face because Dutch cuts her gaze away, too fast to be the guilt he hasn’t even started working on yet, too fast to be anything but reflexive self-preservation.

_Ah, Dutch._ If he’s feeling his brother’s absence like a rotten tooth, he knows it’s a lot closer to a bullet through the gut for Dutch, but there’s not a godsdamn thing he can do about that he’s not already doing. And since their resident fixer-of-things did a fucking runner, it’s down to D’avin to run interference, because Dutch sure as shit isn’t going to be good for it until Johnny’s back where he belongs. Not exactly his strong suit, but he’s had all kinds of horizons expanded lately.

“It doesn’t work like that and you know it. Ship like this, we can’t go halfway. He’s either crew or he’s not. And if he’s not, then he needs to find a new couch to crash on.” Dutch glares at him mutely over the rim of her glass, and he just raises an eyebrow in return. “You called him _Johnny_ , Dutch. Fancy’s an asshole but even he’s got his limits.”

Her vaguely annoyed expression smooths out into that absolute blank that only Dutch can project. “I did?”

“Approximately thirty-two seconds after D’avin vacated the top of the tower,” Lucy confirms, from above.

“...balls.” Dutch takes a fast swig of hokk, draining the glass and setting it aside. “Fine. I’ll talk to him.”

He waits until she makes eye contact and then holds it. She’s not the only one who can play dominance games. “Before the next warrant?”

She narrows her eyes, trying to make it look playful and mostly succeeding. “Don’t push your luck.”

That’s probably about as good as he’s going to get, he judges. “Yes ma’am,” he says, and uncoils from the chair, rolling his shoulders into a spine-crackling stretch. “And on that cheerful note, I’m going to leave you to it.”

She tilts her head back to look at him, her lips curving up in a smile that’s just this side of inviting. “Aw, so soon? And here I thought you were supposed to buy me a drink.”

Dutch flirts as a reflex, sometimes; mostly when she’s trying to cover up something she doesn’t want to talk about. He knows it the same way he knows Johnny always smiles extra-sweet when he’s trying to lie or how Fancy gets even more sarcastic when he’s actually upset, but it doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Especially not here in the cockpit, with the lights low and the vast reaches out space spread out in front of them. All they’d need is some music and they’d be right back in the third-worst day of his life.

“I got a secret for you, Dutch: I stole it from your stash anyway.” He drains his own glass and tucks it between two fingers, then bends down to give her a smacking kiss on the forehead, just to earn her rusty chuckle. When he leans back up, her eyes are closed. “Besides, I saved the day today. I earned a little extra rest.”

She blinks her eyes open slowly, then smiles up at him, a little more naturally this time. “True,” she says. “But if, in the future, you could see your way to saving the day _without_ giving me a bloody heart attack, I’d appreciate it.”

_You’re one to talk,_ he thinks, but even inside his own head he can’t manage to sound anything but fond. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says instead, and heads off, throwing a wave over his shoulder. “Night, Dutch.”

“Sweet dreams, Jacobis.”

_Yeah,_ he thinks, heading for his room. _That’d be nice._

###### 

Three days later they have a lead on their wayward scarback and a warrant to cover their ass, and D’avin almost, almost starts to feel like things might be going their way for a change.

Naturally, it takes less than five minutes for the op to go sideways.

“Okay, I’m officially calling it,” D’avin says, teeth chattering. “No more swimming on a warrant. You know what they say, once is happenstance and twice is a coincidence, but three times…”

“Stop being such a baby, it was only a little dip.”

“In a frickin’ sewer!”

“Got us out of the line of fire, didn’t it?”

“And into the frying pan.” A whirring noise follows, and he looks up, sees a billow of frosty air start out of the ventilation grate. “Or should I say, freezer?”

Dutch’s gaze follows his, and her lips part on a soundless oath. “They’re cycling the temp on the enviro system.”

D’avin hunches in on himself and wishes, futilely, that he’d worn a few more layers. Knowing that they’d be just as miserable as the rest isn’t really making him feel any better. “Well, you have to admire their efficiency. They don’t know where we are, so they’re just gonna sit up there and freeze us out.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Dutch says fiercely, and puts a hand to her earpiece. "Fancy, can you read? We're trapped and need evac. Repeat, we are trapped and need evac, please respond."

There's a crackle of static on the line, and then, finally, blessedly, Fancy's annoyed drawl. "I'm working on it. I've had to go to ground myself, it'll take me some time to work through their security system.”

He and Dutch look at each other. Her lips form a soundless _shit._

“How long?” D’avin asks.

A pause. “An hour, maybe more. Can you hold out?"

He and Dutch look at each other, down to their sodden clothes, up to the vent fans above them. Dutch raises an eyebrow. D'avin spreads his hands in a shrug. She sighs and holsters her pistol. "We'll certainly try."

"Good. But we're going to need to have Lucy cut the feed while I'm working. Their sensor sweeps can pick up our comms if they know where to look."

Dutch looks even less happy about this, but she nods. "Understood. Set your chrono for ninety, because if I don't hear from you by then I'm going to make my own exit, and you won't like it."

"Mines?" D'avin mouths. She smirks.

"Understood," Fancy says, sounding even grumpier. "Going dark."

There's an audible signal flicker and then the bone-deep hum of an active communit cuts out, leaving him feeling briefly dizzy from the lack. Across from him, Dutch looks almost as disoriented, but she shakes it away after a moment. "So, soldier boy," she says, looking up at him with something like a wry smile. "I'm guessing your army saw to it that you got some thermal conditioning somewhere along the line?" 

"Week three in basic," he says, already unbuckling his shoulder brace. "Not one of my favorites."

"Mine either."

"Yeah, tell me something I don't know, Miss I Grew Up in a Harem on the Equator." He pauses, his fingers going still over the zipper with his jacket still half-undone. "Dutch."

"Um?"

"Please tell it wasn't Khlyen. Lie to me, if you have to."

"RAC academy," she says. He lets out a relieved breath and she drops her jacket into a sodden heap on the ground, yanking at her thigh holster, pulling it free and slinging it over her shoulder so she can get at her belt. "It's the same on your end of the J, then?"

"Get down to boots and skivvies, get under cover and share whatever heat you've got left?" he says dryly. He has to look away from her graceful fingers popping the buttons at her waistband, focusing instead on undoing his own holster and hauling his shirt off over his head so he doesn't watch her wriggle out of those skintight trousers. The shock of the cold on his suddenly bare skin only manages to heighten his awareness of the blush heating his cheeks. _Be cool, Jacobis, for once in your godsdamned life._ "Why mess with the classics?"

"Why indeed." He hears the slap of wet cloth on concrete, and out of the corner of his eye he sees her rearrange her clothes into a single flat layer layer on the ground. “I’ve got the cover part taken care of, if you can handle the rest.”

Women tend to run cooler at the best of times, and Dutch is from a desert planet. “Right. Here to help.” He has to sit down to wriggle out of his wet jeans without taking off his boots (not the most graceful process in the world) and when he straightens back up she's bent over with her back to him, laying out his shirt and jacket. He clears his throat, fighting like hell to keep his gaze from wandering anywhere it doesn't belong.

She straightens up and takes the jeans he's holding out, tosses them down next to the rest and then nudges them flat with one booted toe. "Ready for the fun part?"

"So ready," he says, shivering. She reaches into her backpack and pulls out a little black pouch, holds it up for his inspection. His eyebrows lift. "Okay, I thought you were joking about the cover. You seriously have an emergency thermal blanket?” He peers down at her pack. “What _else_ do you have in there?”

"Lesson number one: _always_ be prepared for the worst.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I for one am not complaining.” He takes the pouch out of her hand and activates it with a snap, turning the small square of fabric into a thin black sheet, just big enough to wrap entirely around one Dutch-sized person or both of them somewhat less completely. He stretches it out and cocks his head. “You couldn’t have sprung for the magnum?”

“Oh, the number of times I’ve heard that.” Despite the smear of insinuation in her voice, Dutch’s face is businesslike as she ducks under his arm and presses herself up against his front, wrapping her arms around him and locking her chilly fingers in the small of his back. “C’mon, soldier. Improvise.”

“That’s like our entire motto.” It takes some wriggling, but he manages to get the thin sheet of fabric wrapped more-or-less around the two of them. “Better?”

“Much,” she says, nudging her nose into the notch of his collarbones. He suppresses a yelp and just tugs her closer, nudging her head into a slightly better angle and wrapping his free arm around her shoulders. “Mm. _Much_ better.”

_Glad one of us is happy,_ he thinks wryly, and adjusts the blanket around them. “C’mon, let’s sit down. We’re going to be here a while.”

“Don’t remind me,” Dutch grumbles, but she follows when he tugs her down to the ground. It takes some arranging to get both of them back under the blanket, but eventually they end up with him under her, his back against the wall and her straddling his hips, curled down tight with her arms looped around his neck and her head tucked under his chin. He wraps the fabric snugly around their shoulders, tucking the ends in tight behind his back, leaving only their heads and his feet sticking out into the cold. He’d rather have their heads covered, especially with their damp hair, but keeping their core temp up is more important.

Dutch is somewhat more dubious. “You going to be okay like that?” she asks him, twisting just enough to see where the blanket ends. “We could try a different position-”

“Trust me, there’s no way the both of us are going to fit entirely under this thing,” D’avin interrupts, before she can suit action to word. _If there had been, I’d never have put her in my godsdamned lap, that’s for sure._ “I’ll be fine until Fancy can get us that evac.” He wriggles his fingers against the small of her back, where he can already feel the blood starting to sluggishly push its way back into his extremities. “And I’ll still be able to shoot straight.”

“Have I mentioned lately how much I appreciate your priorities?” Dutch sounds amused. “All right, then, if you’re certain.”

“One hundred percent,” he lies. Already he can’t feel his toes, but that doesn’t matter. He’s gone further on worse, and they’ll be back on Lucy before any actual damage sets in. He can manage for an hour or two, and if Fancy’s plan goes sideways, well, he can always tell Dutch then. “Get comfy, boss lady. We’re in for the long haul.”

Dutch makes a thoughtful noise. “Worse places to be.”

“Yeah,” he says, smiling a little helplessly into her hair. “You could have Fancy down here with you.”

She laughs at that, shoving him lightly on his shoulder. “Shut your face.”

“Shutting now, ma’am.”

###### 

It takes a while before they manage to stop shivering, but eventually their shared body heat starts to warm up the little bubble of space trapped under the thermal blanket. As his muscles gradually unknot, tremors winding down into blissful relaxation, D’avin leans his head back against the wall and lets himself fall into a half-doze. He hasn’t been getting a lot of sleep lately, and while there aren’t what he’d call ideal napping conditions, at least he’s fairly certain he’s not going to fall far enough asleep to have another godsdamned nightmare.

Dutch, on the other hand, does not seem to share his cultivated appreciation for unexpected downtime. She holds out longer than he would have thought, honestly, but after the last of her shivers trail off it’s only a matter of time before she starts fidgeting again. Little twitches at first, like she’s trying her best and her restless muscles just won’t cooperate, but then after a bit she starts to shift back and forth, like she’s trying to get comfortable. D’avin puts up with it for a minute, but when her shifting starts to rub her against places he'd rather be left well enough alone he locks one arm in place around her hips. “Quit wriggling.”

She lets out an annoyed huff of breath that he can feel against the side of his throat. “Or what?”

_Oh, I can think of a few things._

“Or you’re going to dislodge the blanket,” he says, which seems to settle it, judging by the slump of her shoulders. “I’m finally starting to feel my fingers again. Leave it alone.”

Silence for another few moments. “There’s got to be _something_ we can do.”

“Nope,” he says, popping the _p_ just to hear her little hiss of annoyance. “Just gotta wait it out.”

“I hate waiting.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” 

“Why don’t _you_ hate waiting?”

“Blame the army. Lotta ‘hurry up and wait’ with those folks.” She goes to move again, and he pins her more tightly this time, slitting his eyes open to give her an annoyed look. “Will you stop? I would have thought a woman with such a _close personal_ friendship with the scarbacks would be better at meditating.”

She lets out a little _hah!_ “I haven’t exactly spent a lot of time in religious contemplation.”

Yeah, he just _bets_ she hasn’t. “Hey, speaking of Monk Pants-”

“We were?”

D'avin politely ignores that. "How's he doing, anyway?”

“Alvis?” Dutch sounds amused. “He’s fine, as far as I know.”

He feels his eyebrows creeping up towards his hairline. “‘As far as you know?’ We were on Leith just a couple days ago.”

“At the bazaar, sure. I haven’t seen Alvis since...”

They’ve both been doing that a lot the last few weeks, ending their sentences with that awkward pause, _since…_ Since the Accord. Since they saved the Quad. Since Khlyen died. Since they set off on this insane mission to win a war when they can't even find the battlefield.

Since Johnny left.

“We’ve exchanged messages a few times, of course,” she continues, as if she’d never paused at all. “But we’ve got our work, and he’s got his.”

Yeah, D’avin wasn’t exactly figuring she’d gone to see him for _work._ “Huh.”

He can feel her twist slightly, like she’s trying to peer up at his face. “It’s not like we’ve been parked near the monastery, D’av. When did you think I was going to see him?”

“Figured you were taking off-book transpo from the bazaar to keep it off the flight path,” he says with a shrug. “We’re there often enough.”

“Well, I haven’t.”

She still sounds amused, but it’s with an edge of defiance that warns him to back off, so he clears his throat, tips his head back against the wall. “Okay then.”

Silence, for a moment. Two. And then: “We’re not...” Dutch makes a frustrated noise, like her inability to use feeling words is his fault. “It’s not-”

_Boy_ does he ever regret starting this conversation. “Didn’t I just say okay?”

“Yeah, but you said it with a judgey tone.”

“There was no tone.”

“There was a little bit of a tone.”

He wants to roll his eyes, but doesn’t in fear that she’ll sense it, somehow, and make him pay. “Any tone you may or may not have heard-”

She makes a derisive noise.

“-was just concern, pure and simple.” His fingers twitch with the urge to run his hand up and down her spine, but they're warmed enough now that he’s lost that excuse. He leaves them curled loosely in the small of her back, where they can’t wander anywhere uninvited. “There’s been a lot of shit going down lately, and I worry how you’re dealing with it. That’s it.”

“Hmmph,” she grumbles, but she sounds mollified. He may not have had much in the way of schooling growing up, but his Dutch-to-normal-person translator is working just fine. “The only thing you need to be worrying about now is whether or not Fancy can actually live up to his name and get us out of this predicament. And how quickly I’m going to rip him a new _arsehole_ for getting us into it in the first place.”

It’s a good speech. A for effort, and all that. Too bad D’avin knows her. “Uh-huh.”

An annoyed pause. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He looks up at the ceiling and purses his lips. “You had that talk with Fancy yet?”

“...no.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He can feel her scowl pressed against the side of his neck. “I fail to see how talking about our feelings would have fixed the problem of him being slow off the mark earlier and getting us seen.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t’ve, but that little heart-to-heart you keep putting off might have gotten him to follow your lead when you changed the plan in the middle of the mission.”

“It wasn’t like I did it for fun, you know. The patrols were off schedule, I had to make a spur-of-the-moment tactical decision-”

“-which he didn’t follow-”

“-right, which he didn’t follow, which was how we got into this mess. If he’d just trusted me enough to know what I was-” She cuts herself off. “Oh, right. Very clever, Jacobis.”

He grins at the ceiling. “Can I help it if I’m a fine study of human nature?”

“You’re a pain in the arse, is what you are.”

“You love me, really.”

She makes a thoughtful noise rather than answer. “Fine. I’ll talk to him after we get out of here.” She sighs hard, a short sharp gust against the side of his throat that makes him shiver in spite of himself. “ _If_ we ever get out of here. How long’s it been, anyway?”

He gives a helpless sort of shrug with his hands, loosely laced together at the small of her back. “Can’t see my chrono. Probably about an hour?”

“Great,” she grumbles. “Only thirty more before I officially have an excuse to kick him up and down the cargo bay.”

“ _Talking,_ Dutch, remember? We’re going to use our feeling words.”

“If you insist,” she says. “But my way’s more fun.”

He allows himself a brief, wistful moment to picture it. He’s seen Fancy fight, and he’s good - damn good, actually, not that D’avin will ever say that out loud, _ever_ \- but he’s too careful, too precise. Like he’s going for a tournament win. D’avin could take him, though Fancy would make him bleed for it; he’s got reach and weight on his side, and six months in the cage taught him to fight mean.

Dutch would fucking crush him.

“Yeah,” he says, with a sigh that probably reveals his train of thought a little too well, judging by Dutch’s muffled snort of laughter. “But my way will keep him from shoving us both out of the airlock.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Troublemaker.”

“Maybe,” she says, and he can feel her smile against the side of his neck. “That’s usually your job, you know. When’d you turn into such a grown-up?”

There’s too many ways he could answer that question, and all of them depressing. “It’s a side effect of my awesome new wizard powers,” he says instead, tweaking the ends of her hair. “Blame Khlyen.”

“Oh, for so many things.”

She goes quiet after that, banter for the moment exhausted, but he knows she’s not done. She’s gone still again, mostly, but she’s not relaxed enough to be properly zoning out and he can feel her thumb stroking absently over the nape of his neck in an endless preoccupied loop. It should be annoying - he doesn’t like getting poked - but it’s sort of weirdly soothing in spite of itself, and he half-closes his eyes, mind drifting as he waits for whatever that twisty brain of hers is going to spit out next.

“D’av,” she says, a few minutes later.

“Mmm?”

“You’d tell me if you were in trouble, right?”

He’s distracted enough by her idle petting that the question - and the quiet way she asks it - takes a minute to percolate through his brain. When it does, he opens his eyes the rest of the way to see her peering up at him, the shadow of worry softening the sharp line of her cheekbones, pulling downwards at the corner of her mouth.

“Yeah, course,” he says, too surprised to even try to make a joke out of it. “Why?”

Her stroking thumb stills, and her fingers tighten down on the knob of his spine. “I know something's wrong,” she says, her voice still soft. “You've been on edge, twitchy. Up all hours, drinking too much…" He says nothing, heart pounding, and she sighs, uncurling slightly until she can straighten up and look him in the eye. "This isn't some kind of intervention, D'av. You do what you have to do. I just want you to know that you can come to me. That’s all.”

And here he was thinking that he'd been so subtle. He should have remembered: Dutch notices everything. Usually when you want her to the least.

"I'm fine," he says, and looks away from her knowing gaze. "Five by five."

"And, what? I'm just supposed to believe that?" Dutch sounds angry, and a small, mean part of him thinks, _Good. At least I'm not the only one._ "You're a worse liar than your brother, and that's saying something."

The mention of Johnny makes him tense up, makes hurt rattle around in the bottom of his chest, loosening his tongue and making him say something he shouldn’t. "Yeah, well, you don't have to worry about me taking off, so maybe give it a rest, huh?"

There's a brittle, frigid pause, and then he can hear the hurt in her voice when she says, "That's not why I was asking."

"Shit." _Way to go, Jacobis. Keep this up and you'll be worse than Fancy._ " _Shit._ That was over the line. Way over. I'm sorry."

Another pause, and then he feels her fingers stroke gently over his neck once more, and he knows he's forgiven. "I don't want you to be sorry, D'av. I just want you to be _okay_. I'm not the only one who's had shit to deal with, lately. And you're not the only one who's worried."

"Shit," he says again, and lets his head thunk back against the wall. He can deal with her anger, even her disappointment if he has to. But he doesn't know how to handle her honest concern. "Hells, Dutch, what do you want me to say, here? That I'm not sleeping? I'm not. That I've got nightmares again, shit I thought I had sorted? I do. That every time I'm in a crowd I'm wondering which one of them is an enemy combatant in disguise? That I'm forgetting how to be a civilian again? That every time I close my eyes, I picture Sabine with her brains blown out down there in the snow, cold and alone and-”

He cuts himself off, breathing hard. "Shit. _Shit._ Can we pretend I didn't say that last bit?"

"If you like," she says, too-neutral and brittle. Silence wallows between them for a moment, tense and awkward, and then she looks away, a muscle ticking over in her jaw. "Look, if you need to talk to someone-”

“Yeah, because that worked out so well last time.”

Her mouth tightens. “It doesn’t have to be a doctor. Hells, it doesn’t have to be a _professional_. You could always spill your guts to one of Pree’s sexers, that’s what Johnny always did.”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

She very carefully does not grit her teeth, but he can tell that she wants to. “Or, and here’s a thought, you could talk to _me,_ for godssake. I’m right here, and I’m your _partner_.”

“Oh, right. Because talking about our feelings, _that’s_ a thing we’re good at.”

She bristles. “You could _try._ ”

“What, like you’re doing?”

“Fancy-”

“Not talking about Fancy,” D’avin says. “I’m talking about you. And how I’m not the only one who’s not okay.”

All of the frustrated warmth in her face goes out like he’s flicked a switch, leaving a perfectly blank expression that he has extremely privately dubbed her ' _tiny princess assassin_ face.' “I told you, I’m fine.”

_And to think, this woman was_ trained _to lie._ “Uh-huh. And all those times I’ve been up in the middle of the night and you’re not sleeping either, that’s, what. Coincidence? Poor circadian rhythms?”

“None of your business?”

“Yep,” D’avin says, and closes his eyes again. “Like I said.”

There’s a long silence, and then he feels her shoulders rise and fall in a sigh. “Shit,” she says, feelingly. “Fine. Yes. I haven’t been sleeping very well either.”

He cracks his eyes open again. She looks about as happy to be having this conversation as he is, which does make him feel a little better. “Nightmares?”

“Worse,” she admits. “Memories.”

There’s a lot of things she could be talking about - Dutch has put a lot of living into a quarter-century - but he knows what she means, anyway. “Khlyen?”

She tips her head in assent.

"And those aren't nightmares?"

"It wasn't all death and torture and betrayal," she says, with a tiny, sad smile. "It'd be easier if it was. Your turn."

He doubts that’s the last of it, but he also knows that Dutch likes to work up to things. She’ll tell him more once he’s spilled his guts first. "Death, torture, and betrayal," he says, with a straight face that cracks a little when she scowls at him. "No? Too soon?"

"You have never actually beat me at hand-to-hand," she muses, but there's the veriest twitch in the corner of her mouth, which he's taking as a victory. "Just something to think about."

"You're so violent," he sighs, then ducks away when she makes a half-hearted attempt to headbutt him in the jaw. "No, c'mon, what's to tell? They're just nightmares. Nothing new."

She traces absent patterns along the tops of his shoulders. "Last time it was repressed memories, right? From the wipe."

"Okay, a little bit new. Red 17, mostly," he admits, because it's not like Dutch can't put the godsdamned pieces together. "Both me, and that horrorshow in the old lab. Some of the old stuff, what I can remember from Jaeger's _fucking_ test run, even a few missions that went bad before."

Dutch, begging him to stop, the crunch of her cheekbone shattering under the ball of his foot. The punched-out little gasp Johnny gave when the knife slid home. His own black eyes, huge in his still, cold face, immortalized forever in Lucy's grainy security footage. The one monster he'll never, ever be able to forget.

"And of course, brain-bending with Mossy, natch,” he says, injecting some pep into his voice. "That's some nightmare shit right there, let me tell you. Do you know how many teeth those bastards have? Like a hundred, easy."

Dutch doesn't take the bait, though. "You mentioned Sabine."

He gives her a look, one that says, _I distinctly remember you agreeing to forget that ever happened._ Her steady look back says, _You made me use feeling words. Payback's a bitch._

Gods damn it.

“I just think about her sometimes, is all.” He looks up at the ceiling and purses his lips. “Like, is she still out there, somewhere? I had Lucy scan the surface for her remains and she didn’t find anything, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

Dutch gives a little sigh. “You too, huh?”

He should have realized she’d done the same. Of course she did. In her way, Dutch has the most overdeveloped sense of responsibility of anybody he’s ever met. “Great minds think alike, I guess. It doesn’t mean the Root took her - there’s a lot of scavvers out that way, predators, all sorts of shit-”

“But it’s the most likely option,” Dutch finishes. “Yeah. I know. It doesn’t mean they could save her, though. We haven’t exactly tested if a bullet through the forehead counts as ‘sudden brain death.’”

“Probably depends on the bullet.”

“True.”

“And I don’t know that she’d want that, anyway. I mean- if she _could_ heal. It’s like that monk on Arkyn. How much is too much, you know? She lived for seventy _years_ like that. No feelings, no sense of self… Shit, at least in the army they only claim own your body, not your godsdamned _soul._ ”

She cups her hand around the side of his neck, soothing. “She might not be hullen anymore, you know. If she was made with Arkyn plasma…”

“She’d be cured. I know.” He takes a breath, holds it, then lets it out slow. “Assuming she survived. Assuming they didn’t infect her again. Assuming she survived the process a second time.”

“If she is, we’ll find her,” Dutch says, low and fierce. “Somehow. They have to have left a trail somewhere.”

“Yeah.” He loves her all the more for promising, even though she knows as well as he does that the chances are so remote as to be nonexistent. “Anyway. I just keep thinking… You know she begged me, that night you were gone? Not for her freedom, of course. She knew she'd never get me that way. No, she begged me to tell her I cared about her. That she was a good person. That she mattered."

"Oh, D'av."

Dutch sounds so unbearably sad, small in a way she didn't even when she was telling him the worst parts of herself, and his hands tighten to fists in the small of her back. "And you know the worst part? I couldn’t even tell her what she wanted to hear. I didn’t know her, Dutch. I mean, I knew who she pretended to be, gods know how much of _that_ was real, and I liked that person well enough, but she wasn’t exactly the love of my life. She wanted me to feel something, and I mostly just felt sorry for her.” He lets out a stuttering laugh. “Shit. That probably makes me sound like an asshole, huh?”

“I don’t think so.” He’d think she was just trying to make him feel better - though she’s not really known for that sort of thing - but she looks thoughtful. “I don’t think it was about you, really. She just wanted to feel _something,_ and you’re…” She glances at him sidelong. “Lets just say that your brother isn’t the only one who lets his heart get the better of him sometimes.”

“Thanks?” he hazards. “I think?”

“I’m just saying, you don’t hold back. And for people like Sabine, and… It can feel like a lot. Even when you maybe don’t mean it to.”

He hears the stuttered pause, and knows with a sudden breath of certainty that she’s not talking about Sabine. “You sound pretty sure,” he says, cautiously.

“Well, she told me. Before… Well, you know.” She glances away and then back, jittery. “It’s why she was after Khlyen. She thought he had a cure, something that could keep her from slipping back under. It wasn’t really about you, particularly. You were just a talisman.”

It’s what he’s told himself a hundred times, a thousand. But it means more coming from her, because Dutch doesn’t pull her punches, and she won’t lie just to make someone feel better. She knows better than most that it never really fixes anything, in the end.

“Wow, way to make a guy feel special,” he jokes, because he knows that she’ll hear his gratitude underneath. And then- “Wait, hold on a second. Why would she think _Khlyen_ had a cure? I mean, he did, obviously, but she couldn’t have known that. Right?”

Her face goes still. "No, you’re right. She didn’t _know,_ she just hoped. Because- well, because he went rogue. Because he _could_. She seemed to know that he could… do things, feel things that other Sixes couldn't."

It takes a minute to parse Dutch-being-vague into normal human, but he gets it a moment later. “Because of you. Because of… things he felt for you.”

“Which was bullshit,” Dutch blurts, sudden and angry, “I _knew_ it was bullshit. Khlyen’s so-called affection always had a price tag. Another mission, another betrayal, another gods-damned red box. I might have thought that was love when I was younger and didn’t know any better, but it wasn’t. Real love doesn’t have _conditions._ ”

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what she’s talking about. Or rather, who. “Johnny’s a hard act to follow.”

“Especially for a psychopath,” she says bitterly. “Whatever he did to me, he didn’t do it out of love. It was for him. It was _always_ about him. It took me years, but I finally accepted that.”

He cups his hand around her hip, rubs his thumb against the jut of hipbone, trying to keep himself from saying the obvious. But when the silence stretches out, he realizes she’s not going to say it, so he sighs and finishes, “And then he died for you.”

She looks away, her generous mouth pressed into a thin line. Then her hand drops to cover his and give it a squeeze, and he knows he’s forgiven.

“You remember when we raided the RAC?” she says, after a moment. “And I made you leave me behind and Turin shot me to get to Khlyen?”

He gives her an incredulous look. “Hard to forget.”

“I asked him why, when he put me in the pod. He said it was about this fable he used to read to me when I couldn’t- Anyway. The moral of the story was that they each needed something, and couldn’t get it for themselves, but in the end, they saved each other. I always thought he meant to say that he saved me so I’d owe him, some other red box down the line. That’s how he always worked. But now I have to wonder…”

“If it wasn’t the other way around,” D’avin says, when she can’t seem to say the words herself. “Because you’d already saved him. Because you made him care, when he didn’t think he could.”

She nods shortly. “It sounds stupid, I know.”

“No,” he says, looking into her cool green eyes. “No, it really doesn’t.”

She studies him for a long second, and he lets her, trying not to think about what she might be picking up from his expression. Then she lets out a little breath of a sigh and leans up, pressing her forehead to his. He holds still, recognizing a moment even if he’s not entirely sure what’s going through her head, and is rewarded with a smile when she leans down again, a little shaky around the edges but sharp and rueful and entirely her.

“We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?”

He can’t help the little snicker that escapes him. “A complete trainwreck,” he agrees, grinning back at her. “It’s a miracle we get anything done.”

Her smile gets just a little bit wider. “Only because I have a good partner.”

He still remembers the first time she called him that - not just ‘her team,’ but her _partner,_ like Johnny. It was in that godsforsaken cell on the _Aegir,_ talking to that fuck Hogan but holding _his_ gaze, telling _him_ that what he did didn’t matter, that she didn’t care, that he was one of hers. It meant a lot more to him than he’d ever let her know, and it made it all the worse when he broke them with his stupid, selfish wants, when the ghosts of his past reared up to hurt her and Johnny both. When he ruined the one good thing that had happened to him in years, just like he ruined everything.

And then Dutch came back for him anyway.

“Well, you know what they say,” he says lightly. “Feed a stray once, and you’re stuck with him for life.”

“I think that’s dogs,” she says dubiously. “And you definitely didn’t stick around for my cooking, that’s for sure.”

He grins. It’s not often she hands him such an easy opening. “Gods no. If I wanted to be poisoned, there’s faster ways to-”

“Okay,” she says, putting two fingers to his mouth to shut him up. “That’s quite enough out of you, I think.”

Her fingers are a few degrees warmer than the rest of his face, from where she’s had them on the back of his neck, and he has to fight not to stick out his tongue and lick them like he used to as a kid whenever Johnny tried to put a hand over his mouth. It’d probably send a slightly different message to Dutch. “Just like an officer,” he mumbles instead, grinning up at her. “The second someone says something you don’t want to hear-”

“If you say ‘you can’t handle the truth,’” she says, eyes dancing, “I’m going to have to gag you.”

“As if you could.”

“Oh, I could. You remember how our last sparring session ended?”

Despite his best efforts, his mind flashes back hotly to some months before: Dutch under him, chest heaving, and then that tournament-perfect flip and she’s straddling his shoulders, his whole body pinned beneath her slight weight, the salty smell of her right in his nose-

In the present, Dutch’s eyes go wide with surprise, and he realizes that she’s pressed way too close not to feel his immediate reaction to his little trip down memory lane. Shit. _Shit._

“Um,” he says. Godsdamnit, and he was doing so well, too. “Uh.”

“So,” she says. “A good memory, then?”

_Wouldn’t it just be great if the ground could open up and swallow me whole? I think that would be just excellent._ “Howsabout we go back to the part where you were threatening me with violence, huh? That was much more comfortable.”

“I don’t know,” she says doubtfully. There’s a smug little twitch to her smile that she usually gets near the end of a fight, when she’s about to absolutely fucking demolish her opponent, and to which he has an unfortunate pavlovian response. “It seems you like that sort of thing.”

He gapes at her. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

“Then you haven’t been paying attention.” She shifts slightly, squaring her weight more surely across his thighs, and he bites his lip as it drags the curve of her ass against his erection. “I’m a cruel woman, D’avin Jacobi.”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” he says fervently. She shifts again, and this time it feels deliberate, if the way she smiles that feline grin when his hands tighten involuntarily on her hips is any indication. “You know, it’s unfair to take advantage of a man in a moment of weakness.”

“And if I want to? Take advantage?”

She looks entirely serious, and he feels his eyes go wide, his pulse suddenly hammering in his ears. “ _Dutch_ ,” he breathes, and watches, faintly disbelieving, as her pupils dilate slightly. _Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit-_ “Dutch, you-”

“Howdy, folks.” Fancy’s drawl cuts in with a crackle of static as the comms come back online. “Did you miss me?”

D’avin closes his eyes, and allows himself, for one slow count to three, to hate everything about Fancy Lee, up to and including his entire existence. When he opens them again, Dutch is staring back at him, looking about as frustrated as he feels. For a crazy half-second, he almost thinks she’s going to ignore the hail.

Then she sighs and looks away, her hand going up to ear to reactivate her vocals. “Fancy,” she says, her voice rueful, and tilts her wrist to check her chrono. “You’re right on time.”

“Unlike some people, I know how to keep a schedule.” Through the line, D’avin can hear the familiar pad of his soft-soled boots on Lucy’s floor. “I’ve secured the prisoner, and we’re coming to you. Evac in about three minutes.”

“Good work,” Dutch says, and even manages to sound like she means it.

There’s a brief, startled pause on the other end of the line. “You’re welcome,” Fancy says, slightly stilted, and then immediately cuts the comm line. D’avin rolls his eyes.

“Smooth,” he sighs, and looks up at Dutch. “So. Shall we?”

“Unless we want Fancy to get an eyeful or two.”

“I make it a personal policy never to give Fancy that much satisfaction.”

“Eurgh. Thanks for that mental image.” She manages to get one corner of the thermal blanket undone, and then gives him a sympathetic look. “Brace yourself.”

He leans more heavily back against the wall and resigns himself to the inevitable. “Do it.”

She yanks the blanket free fast, and the cold hits him like a wall. He manages not to yelp by virtue of gritted teeth, but _fuck,_ it’s a near thing. “I know, I know,” Dutch says, scrambling backwards off his lap, which produces a fresh wave of chill. “C’mon, the faster we’re up the faster we’re back on Lucy.”

Where they’ll almost certainly spend the next few days pretending this never happened. D’avin knows the score, and this was never anything like a good idea in the first place. For more reasons than just the obvious. “Sure thing,” he says, and wiggles his toes in his boots. Well, tries to. “Only one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“I can’t feel my feet.”

###### 

A couple hours later, he’s sitting up in bed, flipping through the latest sales sheets from Rosenkov without really absorbing anything when he hears the knock at his door.

“Come in, Dutch.”

The door opens but Dutch lingers diffidently in the doorway, her gaze flickering quickly over his bare chest before coming to rest firmly on his face. He fights the urge to pull the blanket up to his chin.

“How’d you know it was me?”

“Please, like Fancy’d ever set foot in here.” Not that Dutch does either - not anymore - but he doesn’t let that show on his face, just tosses the magazine to the ground with every appearance of ease and jerks his head towards the edge of the bed. “Come on in, pull up some mattress.”

For a moment he thinks she’s going to balk - even, on some level, expects it - but then Dutch shuts the door behind her and drifts across the floor, with a cat’s way of making it look like coincidence rather than compliance. She settles lightly on the other end of the bed, one foot on the floor and the other bumping around his hip. His pulse thuds up into his ears.

“Lucy says you’re feeling better.”

“All thawed out and back to fighting trim,” he says, and flexes a bicep, just to see her eyes go warm. “No permanent harm done.”

“Good. Frostbite is a nasty business. There was one time on Qresh that we- well.” She cuts herself off and glances away, awkward as she almost never is. “You’ve probably heard that one before.”

He has, actually, though not from her. “Well, I don’t mind hearing it again.”

“Maybe later.” She flashes him a smile, almost normal. “You still owe me that drink, after all. Doesn’t count if you’re stealing it from me in the first place.”

“Next time we’re in port,” he promises. “Pree’s gotta have some real hokk back in stock by now.”

“Yeah, but will he let you buy it, that’s the question?”

She's trying, he knows; trying well enough that she's almost to normal. Anyone else, and he wouldn't have been able to tell. "So how'd it go with Fancy?"

“How’d you know I-”

He gives her a look. “Please.”

“Fine.” She pulls up the leg that was braced against the floor, folds it over her other knee in one of those carelessly flexible moves that always make him wonder if she’s secretly replaced all of her joints with ball bearings or something. “It went fine. We had a lovely little heart-to-heart, hugged it out, had a good cry…”

“You mean you traded witticisms for five minutes and walked away without ever actually directly discussing the issue at hand.”

“Why mess with the classics?”

He has to laugh. “Well, I suppose feeling words are wasted on that asshole anyway.”

“I thought so.” Looking tremendously pleased with herself, Dutches stretches out her foot just a little further so she can nudge at his ribs with her toes. “Don’t fret, mother. I said what needed saying.”

“Oh yeah?” He wraps a hand around her ankle to keep her from nudging at any ticklish spots. If anyone could do it in boots, it’d be Dutch. “What’s that?”

"That he's good at his job. That I value his contribution to our little insurrection." She gives him a sidelong look. "That he's crew."

He rubs a thumb over the ball of her ankle. "That's what he needed to hear."

"Well, that, and that if he doesn't stop trying to bollocks up Lucy's control schematic she's going to fry him for real one of these days."

"Hopefully he listens to you in that one, 'cause I keep telling him and he sure as shit hasn't been listening to me."

“No offense, D’av, but I think it’s more likely that the Hullen just up and decide to leave our corner of the galaxy alone out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“I sort of miss when I could make his head explode,” D’avin muses. “Don’t you miss when I could make his head explode?”

“I refuse to answer that on the grounds I might incriminate myself,” she says, and they share a grin.

It goes quiet then, though, and D’avin feels awkwardness creeping up around the edges. _Should have got up and put on a shirt,_ he tells himself, but it’s a little late now. He hadn’t figured on Dutch coming to him, is all. She usually prefers to wait him out - she’s an ambush predator at heart, never one to beard the dragon in his den if she can lure him into a trap instead. And she never comes to his room.

Any other woman, he’d take the hint pretty clear, especially in light of their interrupted moment down in that tunnel. But this is Dutch, who’s twistier than any of Johnny’s circuit boards and never comes at things straight if she can work around the edges instead. Maybe this is her way of saying they’re still good, after what happened earlier. Or, hell, maybe she’s just making a point about how she still likes him better than Fancy - which, hah, as _if._

Only way to know is ask.

“Hey, listen-” he says, just as she says, “So I was thinking-”

They both stop at the same time, and she tilts her head, a silent _go ahead._ He gives her a _get real_ look. He’s not going to go first and give Dutch even more of an advantage than she already has. He’s not dumb enough to think she can’t read him like a book, anyway. “Ladies first.”

She gives him half a smile. “Not usually.”

Nope, no way, he isn’t anywhere near drunk enough to touch that one. He’s learned his lesson there. “So you were thinking…?”

He knows it was the right play when it earns him the other half of her smile. “About our conversation earlier,” she says, and waits.

Some animals play dead when a predator’s on their tail; D’avin plays dumb. “What conversation?”

“About sleeping. And how we’re not getting enough of it.”

“Oh, right.” He clears his throat and wonders if maybe he should move his leg away from hers. “That conversation.”

“And I was thinking-” As if she can read his mind, she puts a hand to his knee, stilling it before he could twitch away under the blankets. “-that I might have a way for us both to sleep sound tonight.”

She’s not talking about an extra glass of hokk before bed. D’avin knows he’s not always quick on the uptake, but he _can_ take a hint, if you hit him with it hard enough. “You think that’ll work?”

“Can’t hurt to try, right?” Her thumb inscribes little circles on the inside of his knee. Even through the blankets, the touch almost seems to burn. “We could both us a distraction or two.”

“Or two?” he says, just to see her smile. “Promising high, aren’t we?”

“Oh, darling, you know I always deliver.” Her hand wanders a little higher, catching the hand he has sitting on his thigh and weaving their fingers together. “I think it could be good for us, that’s all. One night, no strings, just a little stress relief between friends.” She rubs her thumb against his palm. “If you want.”

Oh, he wants. That was never in fucking doubt, and if she doesn’t know that it’s only because she didn’t want to. He hasn’t exactly been what you’d call subtle.

He waits until she catches his gaze again and then says, very steady, “And if I want there to be strings?”

She doesn’t answer at first, and he doesn’t push - Dutch isn’t the kind of person you can rush. She kneels up on the mattress, knee-walks over to him, and settles into his lap, but he doesn’t take that as an answer, either. She’s just getting a better look at him.

He lets her look.

Finally, the veriest hint of a smile tugs at her beautiful mouth. “Ask me again,” she tells him, very seriously, “in the morning,” and then she reaches up, and she pulls his mouth down to hers.


End file.
